By Fatima Zaidi, CEO & Founder of Quill & CoHost
Podcast Movement’s first New York edition brought the industry to Terminal 5 last week, and over two days I sat down with three of the people shaping where this business goes next: Greg Glenday (CEO, Acast), Dan Granger (CEO, Oxford Road), and Sharon Taylor (CRO, Triton Digital).
I asked each of them the same two questions. What got you to this scale, and what happens next? Three very different companies, and I went in expecting three different answers, but the reality is that they kept landing in the same place.
- Scale came from getting the foundations right
When asked what got the three of them to scale, no one credited a hit show or shiny campaign. Specifically, Glenday’s answer was refreshingly practical. “It’s boring, but alignment,” he told me. His first two years at Acast went into focusing a company that had grown quickly in several directions at once. He used a metaphor I’m going to borrow: a 200-year-old farmhouse starts as one room, and nobody would design it that way from scratch. So Acast made choices. It stepped back from the apps and the subscription business and got specific about identity. “We’re the infrastructure for independent creators.” Alignment first, positioning second, and now, he says, it’s time to step on the gas.
Granger got to scale from the opposite direction, by bringing together two companies that had spent years as competitors. In October 2024, Insignia Capital acquired Oxford Road and Veritone One for as much as $104 million, with Granger put in charge of the newly combined agency. When I asked what he’d credit the growth to, he said “mergers and acquisitions”—before clarifying that this is the rear-view, rather than the forward strategy. What he’s most proud of is the integration itself. His team set aside the assumptions both organizations came in with; worked with the Table Group to define shared values; and built a new leadership team drawn from both legacy companies. “Putting two competing companies together is not a straightforward thing,” Granger said. “Not for the faint of heart.”
For Taylor, it came down to capital changing what’s possible. Moving from Omny Studio, which she led and sold, into Triton and the iHeartMedia ecosystem changed the structure of decision-making. At a startup, a big swing means going out to find the money first. At Triton, “if you put a business plan together, the money part is easier.” A contract that once required real deliberation is now something the team can simply test.
- Measurement is everyone’s thorn
Ask three people at the top of this industry what keeps them up, and you get three versions of the same answer. Granger is the most invested in fixing the measurement problem, and he didn’t dress it up. In July 2025, after concluding that inconsistent metrics were putting more than $1 billion in advertiser confidence at risk, Oxford Road convened the Alliance for Measurement in Podcasting. The group consists of 12 voting members—including Spotify, SiriusXM Media, DraftKings, BetterHelp, Libsyn and UTA—and released the AMP Accords in July 2026 at Oxford Road’s CAO Summit. “When you have to be a CSI detective on every single ad that runs on four different platforms, it’s not sustainable,” says Granger, who’s optimistic that the industry can work together to find measurement solutions: “I really do think we’re gonna get to standards. I just think we are in a bleak period.”
Taylor sees the same friction from the supply side. Budgets are arriving faster than the industry can unlock the inventory to meet them, partly because of how guarantees are structured across the market. Her broader hope is that growth here is collective. A rising tide, as she put it, works better when everyone is rowing in the same direction.
Glenday’s version is about the same guarantees. He’d like to see fewer oversized minimum guarantees that don’t reflect how the medium actually works, and less value extracted between the creator and the audience. Acast’s position is that the relationship belongs to the creator: “We should be invisible.”
- Demand is the real story, and it’s early
What the three of them are most excited about for what’s next all pointed in the same direction: demand, and how early we still are to it. For Taylor, it was Apple, specifically the arrival of video and dynamic video ad insertion in Apple Podcasts, with Acast, Amazon’s ART19, Triton’s Omny Studio and SiriusXM as launch partners. What she appreciated was the intent behind it: Apple built video in a way that keeps creators in control of owning and monetizing their shows. Next, she’s watching the wave of large advertisers, Amazon among them, moving budget into the space.
Glenday’s rosebud is arithmetic. Of the top 500 advertisers globally, he estimates 400 still have room to increase spend or enter podcasting for the first time. The frame he’s building is “narrative influence.” Acast’s own research found that 75% of weekly listeners don’t consider podcasters influencers, yet 84% say they’ve been influenced by one. He’s compiling a list of podcast fandoms for his keynote. It’s past 250.
“A lot of people are like, are we at the mountaintop?” he said, to which he responded that his answer is: “I think we are at the basement.”
What I keep thinking about
I came in asking about strategy and left with three conversations about people. Granger described the industry as “a refining fire,” where clients eventually stop compromising and quality shows itself. Glenday talked about culture as something you actively protect rather than inherit. And Taylor is thinking about how the whole category grows, not just her own line.
Podcasting still has no central authority. As Glenday put it, “We’re not the DMV.” For years we’ve treated that as the thing holding us back. After two days with these three, I think it’s the opposite. Nobody owns podcasting, so nobody gets to put a ceiling on it. Nobody’s at the mountaintop yet, and that’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.
